As communications professionals we understand that groups providing services to the public generally benefit from highlighting their relationships with that public.

At the same time, unpopular campaigns seem to garner even more attention on social, don’t they?

In case you haven’t seen the aftermath of this terrible decision, we’ve got some pictures after the jump.

Of course, the people mocking the NYPD were many of the same people who mocked JP Morgan Chase. It’s almost like no one read any of the many articles about the Occupy movement’s extremely effective presence on Twitter.

Of course, as you are almost certainly aware, the Twitter deluge lead to headlines everywhere, thereby magnifying a wave of terrible publicity that went far beyond complaints tied to individuals or movements that could more easily be dismissed as outliers.

AdWeek initially ran a headline calling the posters “trolls” with the line “Twitter users pounced on the opportunity to tweet any ugly image involving Gotham’s police they could find” as if the call for content weren’t open to everyone.

The meme has gone both viral and international, with a Greek group translating the tag to #myELAS and posting their own pics (which we wouldn’t call “photogenic”)

While the official NYPD account has yet to issue a “we screwed up” message, the number of pics it deemed worthy of sharing so far amounts to two.

So we agree that user-generated content campaigns work best in a forum less visible than Twitter, no?